


Then I Would Come and Find You

by RuinsPlume



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Fluff, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Nipple Play, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Smut, They-Live!AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 05:40:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13024416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuinsPlume/pseuds/RuinsPlume
Summary: This is what saves them every time.





	Then I Would Come and Find You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Llaeyro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llaeyro/gifts).



> With many thanks to the amazing and generous shaggydogstail for the beta. Any remaining mistakes are mine. My prompt was the song [“Astronaut”](http://www.metrolyrics.com/astronaut-lyrics-coco-and-the-butterfields.html) by Coco and the Butterfields, and the wild card challenge of Remus and Sirius in their late 30s. Happy Small Gifts, Llaeyro!

 

**Then I Would Come and Find You**

It's nearly six o'clock when Remus arrives home from lecturing, but there are no lights on in the cottage. Sirius must be working late. Remus hangs his overcoat on a peg by the door and sets the lamps burning. He lights a fire in the grate as well, although it's not particularly cold; the cottage seems lonely without Sirius in it and Remus wants the firelight for company. And to warm the sudden chill he feels at being in these rooms alone, a chill that has nothing to do with temperature.

It's been six months since the war ended and the Veil dissolved. They've had a whole summer and autumn of waking up together every morning in this cosy cottage on the outskirts of Brighton. And with each passing day, Remus grows more amazed that he managed to survive the years of Sirius's absence. Especially the second time, the Veil time. Because now even if Sirius is simply late coming home from work Remus aches, as if the agony of all those lost years can only now seep out bit by bit, so as not to overwhelm him with the truth of how deeply he hurt for so long.

It’s not until he’s got a stew simmering on the burner and is drinking his second cup of tea that he hears the thump in the bedroom.

It’s probably just Sirius’s owl, tapping at the window with a message telling Remus when to expect him home, but Remus slips his wand from its holster all the same, raising his arm in casting position as he enters the bedroom. The war may have been over since the spring, but old habits don’t ever die completely, he’s beginning to realise. They just grow quieter. On good days, anyway.

There’s no owl at the window. There’s nothing. Except there was. Remus knows he heard something. Then he hears it again, a muffled thump. It’s coming from inside the cupboard where they keep their clothes.

Remus downgrades his anxiety from 'Death Eaters' to 'Boggart.' When he and Sirius first moved in, they magicked several built-in cupboards into the cottage’s walls so it was probably just a matter of time before this happened. Wand out, he grips the cupboard’s doorknob and is just turning it when from the other side of the door comes the soft but unmistakable sound of someone clearing his throat.

Not a boggart, then.

Sirius. Having a bad day.

Remus lowers his wand and opens the cupboard door.

Sirius is sitting cross-legged on the floor below the clothes bar full of shirts and cardigans, one of which he’s pulled off its hanger and holds crumpled in his lap.

“Hello, Moony,” he says. He looks a little spooked, his eyes wide and his face pale in the dimness of the cupboard, but it’s not as bad Remus had feared. Sirius isn’t crying or shaking, and best of all, he isn’t Padfoot. There is nothing more heart-wrenching for Remus than to discover Padfoot whimpering and trembling under their bed, which is what kept happening the first couple of months after the war ended. It’s been better recently, but now Sirius is hiding in the bedroom cupboard. That’s new.

“How long have you been in there?” Remus asks.

“Dunno.” Sirius makes no move to get up. “What time is it?”

“Past six. I thought you were working late.”

Sirius looks thoughtfully at Remus. “I didn’t go at all today. I owled in sick.”

“Oh, Pads.” Remus drops to his haunches, reaching into the cramped space to stroke Sirius’s hair. “Was it the dreams?”

“Not only that.” Sirius shrugs, a movement that ends in him hunched over his legs. “After you left for work, I was in the kitchen boiling an egg when suddenly everything became too...” Sirius hesitates, searching for the word. “Complicated,” he finishes, shuddering a little. “And large.”

Remus thinks of the cottage’s cosy rooms, all three of them. This was the one place they’d found that Sirius felt he could handle. Large enough for both of them, yet small enough that it wouldn’t set off Sirius’s panic attacks, which come over him whenever he’s in a place that feels to him like Azkaban, or Grimmauld Place, or the Department of Mysteries—all three buildings warrens of endless gloomy menace, all of them places where he was trapped.

Besides, in this little cottage each of them always knows where the other is.

Unless Sirius is hiding in a cupboard, it seems.

“Fancy crawling out for tea?” Remus asks.

“Not really.”

“Then I expect I’ll have to join you in there,” Remus says, and does.

It’s not a large cupboard. Remus’s knees bang up against Sirius’s, and his shoulder is wedged uncomfortably against the side wall. But it smells nice here in the dark, like wool and cedar and leather and Sirius’s hair. Remus pats his thighs and Sirius leans forward until his head and shoulders come to rest on in Remus’s lap. Remus blinks a few times, his eyes adjusting to the dimness, and notices that Sirius is still wearing the pyjamas he slept in last night.

“Have you been in here all day then?” Remus asks, already knowing the answer.

“Maybe.” Sirius twists around to look up at him, his bony elbows poking Remus’s legs and his feet getting tangled up in a pile of shoes and boots as he turns over. But once he’s settled himself, he gives Remus an upside-down smile. “It wasn’t so awful,” he says. “Not when I knew you would come find me.”

Remus relaxes all the way then. This is what saves them both, every time: the knowledge that even when the old wounds open again, bad as they are, their two deepest wounds have stayed healed. They trust each other now. And now, Remus always comes for Sirius no matter where he’s lost or locked away.

“Of course I would come,” Remus says. He strokes Sirius’s hair and Sirius looks up at him through his eyelashes with a look so fond it makes Remus’s heart flip over. He leans down until his lips brush Sirius’s upside-down mouth.

Then Sirius shifts in his lap, his feet pressing against the wall of the closet so he can push himself back up to sitting. “Moony,” he sighs, leaning back in Remus’s arms. “It’s nice in here, isn’t it?”

“It’s a bit crowded.” Remus’s ankles are protesting being sat on, actually, and painfully so. He works his feet out from beneath him and sits back on his arse, unfolding his legs on either side of Sirius as far as they’ll go.

“It’s not crowded.” Sirius's shoulder blades nudge against Remus’s chest. “Compared to Filch’s broom cupboard, it’s positively luxurious.”

“Ah. I see.” Images of their randy, adolescent selves flow into Remus’s memory—Sirius’s young mouth pressed to his whilst a mop handle digs into Remus's spine. Their robes hiked up to their waists, their cocks grinding desperately together. And suddenly the only thing that feels crowded is the front of Remus’s trousers.

He wraps his arms around Sirius, letting one hand slip inside the open collar of his pyjama shirt.

“Mmm,” Sirius hums.

Remus strokes his palm across Sirius’s chest, feeling the tattoos turn warm under his hand. When his fingers find Sirius’s nipple, he takes hold and twists.

“That’s it, Moony.” Sirius’s hand slides down over the front of his pyjama bottoms. Remus pinches again, harder, and earns himself a broken hum of pleasure.

“You have a thing for cupboards, don’t you?” he asks low in Sirius’s ear.

“I have a thing for you,” Sirius answers, arching up into Remus’s fingers.

Remus pinches the small buds of Sirius’s nipples with both hands now, pleasure coursing through him. His fingers knead and twist, the energy of what he’s doing flowing back and forth between their bodies until Sirius is moaning and twisting beneath him. Only then does he skate his right hand down Sirius’s belly, tangling his fingers in the dark line of hair protruding from the waistband of his pyjama bottoms. Sirius’s hand joins his, helping Remus lower the elastic so they can take his cock out together. Sirius cups his bollocks as Remus closes his hand around the shaft. Sirius is so warm in his hand, dark and intimate and close. Like the cupboard is close around them, and suddenly Remus understands why Sirius wanted to be in here all day. He also understands what he needs to do to get him out again.

He begins stroking, tightening his hand on the upstroke so that Sirius’s foreskin glides up over the head of his cock. Then on the downstroke Remus sweeps his thumb over the glans, where Sirius’s slit is already weeping with arousal. Just like when they were boys at school. Remus plies the clear stream over the silky wet skin and Sirius shivers with pleasure.

“Remember,” Remus says, “how you were always trying to get me into that cupboard outside the Potions classroom?"

“It was a clever spot, Moony. Slughorn would never have told even if he’d caught us.”

Remus slows his hand. “Of course, you also lured me into McGonagall’s transfiguration supplies cupboard on more than one occasion. What’s your excuse for that?”

“I couldn’t help luring.” Sirius turns his face up toward Remus’s, and in the dim light it’s easy to see him as the boy he was at sixteen. “You had the sexiest way of chewing on your lip when you were casting,” Sirius says. “And your face would get all flushed.”

“My face got flushed when you’d start talking to me in there,” Remus tells him, delivering and extra twisty stroke down Sirius’s shaft. “Telling me all the dirty things you wanted to do to me.”

“I was just making sure you were on board,” Sirius says, with a not-quite innocent flutter of his eyelashes.

“Liar.” Remus lets his hand come to a complete stop at the base of Sirius’s cock.

“Fuck,” Sirius mumbles, his voice already a bit ragged. He cants his hips upward. “Come on, don’t stop.”

“Tell me what you wanted—” Remus begins, then hesitates. _Tell me what you wanted to do to me back then,_ he’d started to say. But the boys they were then are...not gone entirely; otherwise they wouldn’t be having sex crammed inside their clothes cupboard, but even so, the boys they once were are people they can’t return to being, not least because Remus doesn’t want to. Not even to be enveloped once more by the impossibly smooth, youthful skin they were both wrapped in. Not even to feel once more the happiness of those wonderful years at school. He could never live through the horror that followed, not a second time. Whatever Remus might want out of what’s left of his life, it is not to be young again.

“Moony?”

Sirius’s hands on his face call him back. Sirius slips his finger inside Remus’s mouth, then pulls it free again, gliding it down Remus’s neck, over the thick scar tissue where he can’t feel anything, and then onto the sensitive skin where he can feel everything, to the hollow at the base of Remus’s throat where he can feel every whorl of Sirius’s fingerprints against him.

“Tell me what you want me to do to you now,” Remus murmurs.

“Hurt me.” Sirius pushes back against him. “Just a little. Pinch my tits again, make me feel you, so—fuck, Moony, _fuck,_ like that—”

He breaks off, gasping as Remus simultaneously tweaks his nipple, hard, and bites down on the fold of his ear, whilst with his other hand he resumes fisting Sirius’s cock.

“You like feeling me?” Remus growls, canting his hips forward, his hard-on pressing into the small of Sirius’s back.

“So much. So. Good.”

“Tell me what else you want me to do.”

“Wank me.” Sirius noses at Remus’s temple, his breath hot in Remus’s hair. “Right here. Me in your arms and my cock in your fist. Bring me off. I want to come for you right here.”

Sirius is so hard, so hot. Remus sets up a rhythm, twisting his hand on the downstroke, Sirius’s precome slicking his palm. Sirius plays with his bollocks, cupping them, then lightly tugging as Remus strokes.

“You like my hand?” Remus hears how his voice has dropped, turned wolfish, and the sound of it makes him harder. He’s not afraid of it anymore.

“Fuck, yes. Want you to--make me.”

“Make you come for me? Make you shoot off right here on the floor of the cupboard? So you can show me how good I make you feel?”

Sirius whimpers his assent.

“Show me who you belong to?”

“Fuck. Yours, Moony, I’m yours.”

“Show me you’re _my_ dog?”

“Oh, God, yes, gonna come—”

Remus takes away his hand.

Sirius groans in frustration, clutching his balls and reaching for his cock, but Remus is too quick for him. He catches both of Sirius’s hands in his own and brings them up behind Sirius, back behind Remus’s neck. “Hold on to me,” he orders. Sirius groans and does it, lacing his fingers together, cradling the back of Remus’s head whilst his neglected cock bobs against his abdomen.

“You come when I tell you, Padfoot.” The sound of him taking control surges through both of them, Remus can feel it in his cock, see it in the flush of Sirius’s erection, in the shallow fluctuation of his ribs as he breathes high in his chest.

“Yes, Moony,” Sirius says, half breathless. “I come when you tell me. Please let me come for you.”

“You want me to make you?” With his other hand, Remus tweaks Sirius’s nipple again. “Wank you ‘til you’re bucking into my fist because you need it so much?”

“Fuck. Yes. Please. When you say I can.”

Remus lowers his hand slowly towards Sirius’s cock, where a long clear thread of precome is leaking down the side of his shaft, glistening in the tight curls at the base of his shaft. Remus touches two fingers lightly to the base of the glans and Sirius moans, tightening his hands hard against Remus’s skull, fighting to keep them there.

“Show me you’re mine,” Remus growls, letting the flat of his hand come to rest on the underside of Sirius’s cock but not making a fist around him, not yet. Sirius’s hips begin to shake, straining with the effort of not bucking against Remus’s palm.

“Yours,” Sirius manages. “I’m yours. You can do what you want with me, Moony, I’m yours, always yours, I’ll wait, I’ll wait til you say—fuck, fuck. Please, Moony. Yours. I’m—”

“So good for me,” Remus praises. A whine not unlike Padfoot’s slips from Sirius’s mouth and Remus feels the submission deep in his cock. “Kiss me,” he orders, wrapping his hand around Sirius’s weeping cock at last. Sirius unlaces his hands to fist them in Remus’s hair, pulling their mouths together. Teeth and tongue and lips together, as Remus holds Sirius firm in his hand, palm skin and cock skin slick with need. Remus speeds up as Sirius moans in his mouth and then cries out, breaking the kiss as his body bucks up toward Remus. His hips jerk once, his face tight with the urgency of near-release. “Come,” Remus says, and Sirius does. His orgasm releasing like a sprung lock so that Sirius opens and opens and opens in his arms. Cock spurting, his head pressed against Remus’s shoulder, his face slackening in relief.

“Oh,” Sirius murmurs when he can speak again. Remus inclines his neck and kisses the sweat off Sirius’s forehead. “Oh. Oh.”

“Better now?” Remus asks gently.

Sirius nods, turning to nuzzle at Remus’s throat. His breath comes hot against Remus’s skin, deep exhalations. They stay like that for a while, Remus resting with his back against the plaster wall and Sirius resting against Remus. At last Sirius’s breaths come more gently, and he shifts in Remus’s arms.

“Shall we get out of here, then?” Remus asks. His right arse cheek has fallen asleep, and his nose is beginning to feel tickly.

“Out of the cupboard, you mean?” Sirius tends to get a bit foggy after he comes.

Remus kisses him on the top of the head. “Yes, seeing as we do have a whole cottage out there. With a bed. If you squint, you can even see it from in here.”

Sirius makes a show of squinting. “I see it,” he says. He turns to Remus, bringing his hand between their bodies, finding the line of Remus’s cock, still half hard in his trousers. “Do you remember,” Sirius asks, stroking Remus’s groin, “what we used to do after we’d got off in Filch’s broom cupboard?”

“Pretend it hadn’t happened and not speak to each other for days?”

Sirius shakes his head, a slow grin parting his lips. “I was thinking seventh year, not fifth,” he says. “I seem to recall you fancied a nice long shower after. And a bit more of my attention whilst under the spray.”

“We have a shower here too,” Remus says, his cock straining against his trouser placket. Toward the warmth of Sirius’s hand, the warmth of water, and the promise of the heat of Sirius’s mouth.

“Well, come on, then.” Sirius backs out of the cupboard on his knees. Then he gets to his feet and holds out his hand, and the slow grin that he gives Remus lights up every cell in Remus’s body. With a longing as thick and heady as when they were boys.

Remus takes Sirius’s offered hand and lets Sirius pull him to standing. “You’ve been at work all day,” Sirius says, sliding both arms around Remus in a hug. “Let me welcome you home.”


End file.
